Tom DeLay: He’s Baaack.
Or maybe he just never left. He might soon be reincarnating as a lobbyist for the American Conservative Union.
DeLay has announced that he’s planning some “new career moves” but denied that being a lobbyist was one of the possibilities. Two board members of the American Conservative Union have threatened to resign if DeLay is hired as their lobbyist.
But another board member, Morton Blackwell, said “virtually every conservative cause has benefited greatly from the devotion and skill of Tom DeLay. He fights our battles beside us. We owe him our strongest support now.”
In March of 2005, Blackwell wrote an “open letter to conservatives,” asking for help to do “something effective against the leftist organizations and liberal media who have launched truly vicious attacks on U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.”
The American Conservative Union rates members of Congress every year on how well they follow Conservative principles. In 2004 DeLay received a 100% rating. In 2005 his rating plummeted to 88%.
posted by Tom Harper @ 7:20 PM
11 Comments:
Sounds like Morton Blackwell has been drinking mass quantities of theocon Kool-Aid, or else he has been giving some well-timed and well-placed blowjobs.
Snave: Why does it have to be just one or the other? My guess is both of the above.
I thought conservatives were opposed to unions....
Kvatch: Yup, and it didn’t even work. He had to remain on the ballot in Texas and his seat went to a Democrat. I’m sure he’ll make a good lobbyist. He has all the sleaze and manipulation skills necessary for the job.
Yank in London: That’s the trouble with conservatives — they have all these catchy slogans and then they end up contradicting themselves. They’re opposed to big government, unless it’s for peeking into everyone’s bedroom and listening in on millions of private phone conversations. They’re opposed to unions unless it’s a union of neocon wingnuts sitting around dreaming up more ways to fuck up the world.
Ah yes, Tom! You must be referring to the Conservative Stink Tanks! Little else but stinky stuff comes out of those dark, purulent places.
Snave: Yup, those stink tanks have sure been polluting the country for the past 30 years or so.
Conservatives in America can be quite hypocritical about these things. My Uncle is a staunch conservative and goes on and on about the teacher's union and how evil it is.
Then he packs up and goes to work at his union job where he earns nearly a six figure salary as (drumroll........) a telephone installer.
Those damn unions!!!!!
"Hot Tub Tom," getting a 100% (or even a 40 or a 50%) from any kind of an organization screams volumes about that organization.
Prague Twin: Conservatives sure have a schizzed out approach to unions. In California the prison guards’ union is worshipped by conservative politicians. California’s prison system is so fucked up, nothing else in the U.S. even comes close; you’d have to look to a 3rd world country for anything comparable. The state prison guards’ union is so violent and so corrupt they make the Mafia look like a church choir. Conservatives donate huge amounts of money to them even while they’re going on and on about unions ruining America, etc.
Jolly Roger: Good point. Any organization that gives DeLay even a moderately good rating has to be pretty wacked out.
Praguetwin, I am not only a teacher, I am a member of my local union, Oregon Education Association, and National Education Association. Needless to say, I find your uncle's view about teachers' unions to be... interesting... considering he is a union member himself, and that he apparently makes close to twice what many teachers make.
If he was asked whether a teacher or phone installer makes a greater contribution to society, which would he choose? Has he spent enough time in public school classrooms to understand that teachers deserve pay that is commensurate with what their jobs entail? Contrary to the popular conservative schtick, not all teachers are liberal Democrats... many are staunch conservatives.
Teachers work too. In fact, I would say from being in schools for the last 25 years or so that about 99% of teachers work hard.
My guess is that your uncle doesn't think people he considers "government employees" should be able to unionize. That's a common conservative gripe about teachers' unions. Another biggie is that most teachers' unions throw their support behind candidates who want to preserve and fix the public school system rather than for candidates who want to privatize everything including schools. If conservatives wouldn't make it a point to attack the public schools, many more teachers might support the GOP.
If your uncle is a staunch conservative, he may be thinking the government needs to stay out of our schools. I tend to think the opposite... without our government there to oversee the system, I believe it would rapidly devolve into a situation where all the wealthy kids' families would send their kids to certain schools, and all the poor kids would attend the rest. I think it would end up with students of poor-to-lower-middle class students and/or students from racial minorities going to the "bad" schools while the wealthy could send all their kids to the "good" schools.
Many conservatives want their kids to go to "good" schools, but I think that to them this means schools that are predominantly composed of white kids from the upper-middle class socioeconomic class (or higher).
I suppose the wealthy can all simply send their kids to private schools if that's what they want, anyway... so why do they and their politicians try and screw things up for the rest of us worse than things already are?
Tom, you are right: Blackwell must be drinking the Kool-Aid AND giving well-timed well-placed BJs!
Post a Comment
<< Home